Focusing on Virginia Woolf and her circle, past and present

Seeing St. Ives and London in Woolf’s time

I’m not sure though that the beauty of the country isn’t its granite hills, and walls, and houses, and not its sea. – Letters II, 462

Imagine this: color film footage of the harbor and streets of St. Ives, Cornwall, and of the streets of London from 1924 to 1926, during Woolf’s time. Imagine something even better: actually viewing this footage online.

The film footage is from Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road (1926) a fascinating social record of inter-war Britain.

The St. Ives snippet below is available on the British Film Industry‘s YouTube Channel. Don’t blink though. The video is just 19 seconds long.

First, the back story

In 1924, Friese-Greene borrowed a flash convertible and took a road trip from Land’s End to John O’Groats and back to London, filming along the way using a unique experimental color process developed by him and his father.

The result was three hours of unedited footage — and some of Britain’s first color film footage — that Friese-Green expected to edit into 26 short travelogues that would be shown weekly at the cinema. His film was first shown at trade fairs in 1925.

What happened next

Here’s what happened to Friese-Green’s film:

Luckily, the film was preserved. The original negatives were given to the BFI in the late 1950s.